Students urged to disregard negative perceptions about TVET

Students of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) have been advised to disabuse their minds of the negative and wrong perceptions about TVET as a field for non-brilliant students.

Mr Adam Samed, Secretary of Network for Sustainable Poverty Alleviation Ghana (NESPAG), who gave the advice, urged students to consider TVET as their first choice course and not to see themselves as inferior to students of humanities.

Mr Samed was speaking at a seminar on: “Promoting Technical and Vocational Education in Ghana,” organised by NESPAG, a non-governmental organization, for students of Dabokpa Technical Institute in Tamale.

The week-long programme, which took NESPAG to other second cycle institutions including Kalpohin Senior High School (SHS) and Islamic SHS in Tamale and the Savelugu SHS, aimed to expose students to the relevance, career and job opportunities available to TVET students, challenges about the sector and how to overcome them.

Mr Samed said the negative and wrong perceptions about TVET had made people to look-down upon the sector, a situation which was affecting the development of the country.

He urged students of TVET to educate others about the prospects of TVET as a means of reorienting them adding that it was more rewarding to pursue TVET.

Dr Michael Brigandi, the Dean of School of Applied Arts of Tamale Polytechnic, urged students of TVET to be proud of their career choices because they were potential employers, who would contribute meaningfully to the development of society.

He said technical students were the determinants of the rate of development of a country adding that the conversion of polytechnics to technical universities offered opportunity for technical students to academically progress.

Mr Samuel Wood, Member of the Board of Directors of NESPAG, called on the Ghana Education Trust Fund to consider formal technical and vocational institutions as a priority sub- sector for funding to attract the youth into the sector.

Mr Wood said government needed to formalise apprenticeship training by establishing a National Apprenticeship Training Board with membership from various sectors to regulate their training in terms of registration, content, duration and certification to develop the sector.

He expressed the need for government to work with other stakeholders to develop a programme to establish and strengthen institutional collaboration and exchange programmes among all technical and vocational schools and key actors in the industry as well as review the curriculum of such schools to make them responsive to the demands of the job market.